Bloom's Modern Critical Views - Dante Alighieri (2004) (338p) [Inua].pdf

Dante Alighieri (Bloom's Modern Critical Views) Paperback – January, 2004
by Harold Bloom (Editor, Introduction)

Series: Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Paperback: 329 pages
Publisher: Chelsea House Publications (January 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0791078256
ISBN-13: 978-0791078259

This is an excellent collection of recent Dante essays, including important studies of his political writings. There's more to Dante than the Comedy--hard to believe, but true!--and Bloom's collection reflects this nicely.

Editor’s Note
My “Introduction” presents an overview of Dante, culminating in the vision of Matilda gathering flowers in the Earthly Paradise of Purgatorio XXVIII.
Charles S. Singleton begins the sequence of essays with his argument that Dante follows the allegory of the theologians, and not of the poets, while Erich Auerbach rehearses his celebrated thesis on the Christian trope of figura, and Dante’s supposed relation to it.
The thematizing of Inferno, Canto IX, by epic tradition, is analyzed by David Quint, after which John Freccero expounds the poetics of the Purgatorio as a process of Dante’s liberation from his precursor Virgil’s influence.
In the first of her two essays here, Teodolinda Barolini also illuminates Dante’s poetic maturation, while Kenneth Gross meditates upon the dialectic of pain and punishment.
Guiseppe Mazzotta, in the first of his two essays, brilliantly tracks the Vita Nuova into Inferno XXVII and shows the fate of the rhetoric of love in Dante.
Jaroslav Pelikan, the most learned historian of theology, guides us into the Paradiso, which he views as essentially Augustinian rather than Thomistic, after which María Rosa Menocal sagely comments upon Dante’s cult of Beatrice.
In reappearances, Barolini finds in Purgatory something like the literal truth, while Mazzotta praises Dante the Pilgrim’s intuitive cognition of an imaginative knowledge that surpasses rational processes.
I myself return in a disquisition upon Dante’s uncanny strangeness in his imaginings both of Ulysses and Beatrice, after which John Kleiner juxtaposes audacity and error in Dante, and William Franke sees the supreme poet as an interpreter in search of truth founded upon belief.